Dr. Love

Yeh, choice. Someone marries the ugly person with a good personality, someone buys the house overlooking the freeway with 24/7 noise. Standards cant be argued with. But flexible standards that depend on what's in your wallet, today, that I dont get so much.

That quite the copy there is actually quite the copy here. Recently graded, and now second highest behind a 6.5 out of 17 in the census. Your book, Lady Death?

Well, that is true. I was mostly amused. But I stand corrected!

You know, I can't see this without thinking, wistfully, of your many exchanges with our old friend, @therealsilvermane Though you disagreed on many things, he was thoughtful, impassioned, often provocative, and held his own against odds. I hope he'll be around next month for the unveiling of one of his favorite stars!

also there was a McCauley piece that got no bids. Available on HA's site for purchase. HA had an estimate of $6,000-8,000. Of course, not in the same league as this GGA type piece below that went for nice bucks in 2019. But it's also been four years since there's been a McCauley original on HA. For it to go unsold, is, to me, shocking.

From HA's current Illustration Art Sig Auction some notable results from digest covers, especially the Valigurskys, which I didn't see coming there was also a Schomburg 1954 dust jacket 21X15 piece from the Schomburg Estate that fetched $32,500

Were you into westerns? Or was that another mike

Chez Chez La Femme

To Infinity and Beyond

Murder She Wrote

I, Robot

in space no one can hear you scream

I havent forgotten. It was the predominant business model for comic dealers - NM if I'm selling, VG if I'm buying. And we're talking about the same book btw. That's not even getting into deliberate undisclosed resto. With the advent of Ebay giving all of us access to each others books, slabbing was a foregone conclusion. But the speed with which the lowly mark grabbed for CGC like a lifeline, this our beloved professional class helped bring into fruition.

Love the direction of the season. The fight scenes are horrendous though. Cant stay wide on a sequence for more than a second, herky jerky back and forth. Hate that, like the first Bourne times a thousand. Almost a complete deal breaker.

That many?

So let me see if I understand this - Dinklage is against dwarves being cast in roles that actually call for dwarves, but is down for a dwarf being cast in a role that could be played by a person of average stature. Hulk's head hurts

Have digests made their way into slabs? Yes, slowly, and far and few between. With CGC's debut of pulp slabs coming to the Collector's Summit 11/4/23, I would imagine that more extensive sci fi/mystery digest slabbing may not be that far behind. One of the big questions, for me at least, will be what kind of slab will the digests go into. The one below is in a 1" deep slab, the deepest slab CGC has in production, more in keeping for a thicker pulp. This introductory issue for Imagination has 164 pages. But the typical digest has 132 pages. Whether it can be put into a less deep slab, and of course centered (rather than right justified), will have a lot to do with the decision to submit. At least for me!

But what is a digest? is it defined by size? content? both? The below is from the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. I have found ISFDB, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database to be of great value in researching digests. I believe that this is the database CGC is pulling from for label attributes on digests, moving forward, as GCD would be of no or little use to them here. "A term used to describe a Magazine format, in contrast to, for example, Slick or Pulp, which are both larger. The format was made popular by the Reader's Digest, which first appeared in February 1922, though at that time the word "digest" meant that the magazine was presenting a selection of material from a wide range of other sources and thus making it "digestible" to the reader. The word referred to the content, not the size, but that original meaning has long since been superseded. The page size of a digest is approximately 7.5 x 5 in, though it can vary slightly; for example, Galaxy was normally a little smaller than Astounding. The latter was the first important sf magazine to turn digest, in November 1943, and by the mid-1950s almost all SF Magazines had followed suit, the Pulp format disappearing. The popularity of science fiction led to the digest magazine boom of the period 1952 to 1955, but by the end of the 1950s a blight had settled over the sf field. The competition with paperbacks led to some magazines taking on the pocketbook format, which averages 7 x 4.25 in; notably New Worlds in the mid-1960s and Destinies from 1978 to 1981, an approach further encouraged by the growing market in Original Anthologies during the 1970s. Magazine circulation has continued to fall, especially newsstand sales, and magazines have tried various formats to retain their visibility. Some, such as Vertex and Science Fiction Age tried the letter-size Slick format, whilst both Analog and Asimov's have twice increased their dimensions so that they are now large digest, measuring 8.5 x 5.75 in, virtually Review size (see Academic Journals). The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is now the only surviving true digest size sf magazine, retaining a consistency from its first issue in 1949."

Could be anybody, Jeff, but my first thought was Ritter. He has been known to buy big grade books, do his thing, and roll the dice on a submit. Ask him when you see him next. If he hesitates, bingo!

Adam Anderson, Conan Saunders, John Verzyl Jr., Austin Reece I love seeing the next generation come up in this business RIP Mikey Halperin

This one doesn't require the Master. On HA search for "promise collection", click the sold tab, and then in the left column open the Genre dropdown and click Adventure. Of the 5,017 sold, HA has 694 with the attribute "Adventure". Surprisingly, two Tomahawk issues are included. How different outfits handle their databases is pretty interesting. From MC's sold list, Adventure includes: Boy Comics. Boy Commandos, Captain Easy, Fight Comics, Four Color, Moon Girl, Rulah, and Seven Seas.

Blissard gets numbers that others can't. And btw it's Hartley Whitney's romance masterpieces are undeniable and within the ACG "Fab 4": Romantic Adventures 49, 50 and Lovelorn 52. Lovelorn 53 is part of the group but not a Whitney.

The economic decision to put $ into stabbing and getting sigs in addition to these lower grade copies mystifies me. For ACG romance? I dont get it. In addition, the placement of Bald's signatures for the most part are in bad taste. Lastly, Bald's sig itself is painful to look at - it's clearly the hand of a very very elderly gentleman. Bald was 96 years old in 2016. Maybe some think it's great he'd be out there signing at an advanced age. Not me.

and speaking of Baily identifiable in terms of the hand, but no one trick pony

if by underappreciated, you mean hated with the heat of a red hot sun by many SA fans, then yes! I strongly recommend a great book, "The Thin Black Line: Perspectives on Vince Colletta, Comics’ Most Controversial Inker" I can't say enough about Colletta's work. At his peak in 1954, it was the best. Not just covers - unlike most others, he could do the heavy interior lifting as well. No harder genre to draw than romance, cause there really wasn't anything exciting happening. Even later in 1958 when he was phoning it in as a surprise uncredited artist in this DC book, his talent shows through